Supergirl's Sacrifice Read online

  Iris shook her head. “No. Cisco must have patched his system through the breach equipment in the Multiverse lab. We’re following Anti-Matter Man through the entire Multiverse.”

  Felicity sucked in a shocked breath. Barry zipped to Iris’s side.

  She was right. The display showed Anti-Matter Man currently on Earth 27, the world he’d utterly destroyed. But according to the readout, a breach had opened there, one that led to . . .

  “Earth 38,” Barry whispered.

  Supergirl. Alex Danvers. Winn Schott and all the others . . . They were all in desperate danger.

  “Get in touch with Supergirl,” Barry told Iris. “Tell her I’m on my way.”

  “We’re on our way,” Oliver insisted.

  Barry hesitated. “Oliver, this is—”

  “This is big cosmic stuff and I’m a guy with a bow and arrow,” Oliver said. “I know. But you needed me last time and you’ll need me again.”

  Barry glanced over Oliver’s shoulder. Felicity, gnawing at a knuckle, nodded, her eyes wide with concern, but her expression resolute.

  “OK, then. We go together.”

  The first and last time Oliver had traveled to an alternate Earth was a few years back, during what later came to be called the Crisis on Earth-X. Being abducted to a world where the Nazis won World War II and America was a fascist dystopia ruled over by his own evil doppelgänger had not been fun.

  Barry assured him that Earth 38 was different.

  They geared up, replenishing Green Arrow’s quiver with replacements Felicity had brought from Star City, and loaded the data they’d accumulated from the original Central City breach onto a thumb drive.

  “We have the coordinates?” Barry asked, strapping on a quantum-tunneling device, which was now the only way they could traverse the barrier between dimensions to get to Earth 38, since Cisco and his vibe powers were gone.

  “Yes.” Iris helped him type them into the quantum tunneler’s interface. Alex Danvers at the DEO had been very specific about where she wanted the Flash and Green Arrow to breach into Earth 38.

  “We’ll keep looking for Cisco and Curtis,” Iris promised, pressing herself into Barry’s arms for a last hug.

  Barry, Oliver, Felicity, and Iris had all gathered at the Cortex to say goodbye. Iris and Felicity would keep working on the problems haunting Earth 1 while Barry and Oliver tried to stop Anti-Matter Man once and for all on Earth 38.

  “I believe in you,” Barry told her. “You’ll have it all worked out by the time we get back.”

  “And when will that be?” Iris asked.

  Barry and Oliver exchanged a glance. They both shrugged.

  “We shouldn’t be long,” Barry said.

  “That’s what you said when you went to Earth 27 that time,” Iris reminded him.

  “Well, yeah . . .”

  “And when you ran into the future,” she added.

  “Good point. Assume we’ll be gone awhile. But we’ll be back.” He held Iris at arm’s length, then took her hands in his own and gazed into her eyes. “I’ll always be back.”

  Felicity cleared her throat into the romantic silence and stared at Oliver pointedly.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Aren’t you going to promise to be back, too?”

  “It doesn’t matter what I promise,” Oliver said very seriously. “Anything can happen.”

  Felicity threw her hands in the air in disgust.

  “That’s true,” Iris said.

  Barry shrugged and gave her his best grin. “Doesn’t matter what happens. I’ll always come back to you.”

  “That’s romantic, Oliver,” Felicity said.

  “That’s absurd,” Oliver announced. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”

  3

  Emergency! Emergency! Supergirl thought with as much ferocity as she could muster. Scramble a medical unit! Prepare a kryptonite needle!

  She was soaring over the National City skyline, cradling her cousin in her arms. Her super-hearing detected a heartbeat, but X-ray vision couldn’t penetrate Kryptonian skin, so she had no idea the extent of his injuries. All she knew was that he was alive and that she had to keep him that way.

  Kryptonite needle . . . ? J’Onn’s puzzlement came through loud and clear.

  For a blood transfusion, Brainy said. You’re bringing Superman to the DEO.

  She didn’t have time to respond. The DEO building loomed before her. Supergirl focused her X-ray vision, plotting the quickest path to the emergency medical facility within.

  I’m coming in hot, she told Brainy. Clear the balcony and corridors 12 and 5, or I’m coming through the walls.

  In her arms, Superman muttered something. It was a sign of life but so weak and pathetic that it did nothing to buoy her spirits.

  “Hang on, Kal,” she said, using his Kryptonian name. “If Lex Luthor and the Galactic Golem and Solaris the Tyrant Sun couldn’t kill you, this won’t, either. I swear.”

  But what, she wondered, is this? He was Superman. She couldn’t imagine anything on or off Earth that could hurt him like this. What threat could actually knock him unconscious and leave him near death?

  As she swooped low over the balcony entrance to the DEO, she tossed those thoughts aside. Time for them later. When Kal-El was no longer in such dire straits. She saw immediately that Brainy must have broadcast her request to the DEO—she had a clear flight path from the entrance to the medical bay.

  Alex was already there, standing by a surgical table, wearing a white smock over medical scrubs. She tugged down her surgical mask as Supergirl slowed to a halt and laid Superman on the table.

  “Brainy said it was Superman, but I didn’t believe it,” Alex breathed. “How am I supposed to operate on Superman?”

  “You know how.” It was Brainy, stepping into the room, dressed for surgery like Alex was. “We use a red solar array to limit his powers so that—”

  “No,” Supergirl interrupted. “He’s too weak. For all we know, his powers are the only thing keeping him alive right now. If we take them away, he could die.”

  “Kara,” Brainy said gently. “It’s the only way.”

  Supergirl pursed her lips. Her chin quivered with raw emotion. She sought out Alex’s eyes, looking for comfort and safety there, but her sister could only shake her head.

  “Brainy’s right, Kara. None of our equipment will work on a powered Kryptonian. We can use a kryptonite needle to give him a blood transfusion from you, but we don’t even know if he needs a blood transfusion.” She gestured to the array of medical machinery around them. “This is all useless if his skin is still invulnerable and we can’t look inside him to see what’s wrong.”

  Supergirl clenched her fists. “Either decision could mean Kal dies. What do I do, Alex? Tell me!”

  Alex came to Kara’s side and hugged her sister briefly. “It’s not up to me. You’re his family, Kara. There’s no time to call Lois Lane. It’s your decision. Tell me what to do.”

  “Wait!” a familiar voice shouted. “There’s another way!”

  Lena Luthor strode into the medical bay as though it were the boardroom of L-Corp, the company she had single-handedly relaunched after its abuses at the hands of her brother, Lex Luthor. With a confident toss of her long, black ponytail, she planted her fists on her hips.

  “Lex had equipment that could hurt Superman. It was all he worked on, the entire focus of his life. We can use that same equipment to help him.”

  “How?” Supergirl asked.

  “That sounds like using a bullet to stop the bleeding,” Alex said. “Not very effective.”

  Lena shrugged. “Lex’s Gamma Blaster can be retuned to use a lower wavelength. Instead of burning Superman’s skin cells, it’ll make them temporarily transparent. So you can look for internal bleeding. And I can modify the Void Cannon to create a stasis field rather than accelerate entropy.”

  Supergirl looked to Alex, who nodded slowly. “It could work. We’ll keep him stable while you do that.”

  “An excellent solution,” Brainy said. “I’ll help you make the adjustments.”

  They ran off together and Supergirl turned back to the table. Superman lay motionless, his costume torn, his face covered in soot and ash. While Alex prepped her equipment, Supergirl folded her cousin’s hand in her own.

  “Stay strong, Kal,” she whispered in Kryptonese. “We’re going to help you, with all the power of Rao at our backs.”

  It had been hours since the fracas at Governor’s Park. James Olsen slumped in a chair outside the DEO medical bay. He was exhausted from helping with the evacuation, and all he wanted to do was go home and collapse in bed. Then sleep for something like eighteen hours.

  But he’d been dubbed “Superman’s Pal” by a puckish press corps years ago, and while the moniker felt minimizing for something as intense as his friendship with the Man of Steel, he still knew it to be true. Superman had saved James’s life any number of times. The least he could do in return was . . .

  Was what? Wait around?

  He clenched his fists in a worthless, impotent rage. He could do nothing. There was nothing he could do to help Clark, his friend, the man to whom he owed so much.

  Lena and Brainy came barreling around the corner just then. “We have it!” Lena shouted.

  “It’s true!” Brainy crowed. “We have it!”

  “Have what?” James demanded.

  “The solution to all of Superman’s problems.” Lena held up a slender, transparent cylinder. Within, a very familiar glowing green rock was awash in a swirling rainbow of floating, popping globules.

  “Kryptonite!” James almost smacked the cylinder out of Lena’s hands. “Get that behind some lead! Are you trying to kill both of them?”

  “S
tand down, Elastic Lad,” said Brainy. “This is something new. We call it . . . Kryptonite-X.”

  “You call it Kryptonite-X,” Lena informed him. “I haven’t settled on a name.”

  “Then it is Kryptonite-X. First mover advantage.” Brainy smiled tightly.

  “‘Elastic Lad’?” James asked.

  Brainy’s face contorted briefly into that expression he reserved for moments when he realized he’d inadvertently revealed something about the future. “Never you mind. A temporal faux pas on my part. A jape, if you will. In the meantime, we discovered this formula for Kryptonite-X in Lex Luthor’s notes.”

  “When he was a boy, Lex tried to find a cure for kryptonite poisoning,” Lena began.

  “I know this story,” James said. “Move it along.”

  If she was hurt by his curtness, Lena didn’t let it show. “In later years, when he and Superman became foes, he began exploring ways to make kryptonite more potent. But what he discovered was—”

  “Kryptonite-X,” Brainy supplied with an air of almost smug superiority.

  “—this stuff,” Lena said emphatically. “It uses green kryptonite as a base, yes, but only as a way of weakening the unique Kryptonian cellular structure enough to make it receptive to the energies in the . . .” She paused and frowned.

  “Bubbly, swirly things?” James asked, pointing to the cylinder. It was, indeed, full of bubbly, swirly things.

  “A liberal arts description of a controlled ambient radiative Kirby energy phenomenon if ever I heard one,” Brainy sniffed.

  “You’re saying this stuff can heal him, right?” James threw his hands up in the air. “Then why are you standing out here talking to me?”

  Brainy and Lena exchanged blank looks. Brainy raised an eyebrow.

  “He has a point,” Brainy conceded.

  “Go!” James screamed, flinging his arms in the direction of the medical bay.

  Supergirl sat by Superman’s side. His skin was warm, but she couldn’t tell if that was due to his own blood still pumping or just the transfer of her body heat as she clutched his hand with enough force to pulp a normal human’s. Some part of her knew that rather than sitting here, she should be out looking for whoever or whatever did this to him. But she convinced herself that J’Onn could handle tracking down the source of Superman’s injuries. She would join up afterward.

  “He’s going to be OK,” Alex said softly, putting a hand on Kara’s shoulder.

  “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” Supergirl said.

  Her super-hearing detected the tail end of a squabble out in the hall: Lena and Brainy, talking to James, whose heart rate suddenly spiked as he shouted, “Go!” With a slight tilt of her head, she caught Lena and Brainy as they entered the medical bay.

  “Give me good news,” Alex said.

  “No time for good news,” Lena said, moving Alex out of the way. “We have to act. Fast.”

  Supergirl reflexively moved aside but did a double take when she saw what was quite obviously kryptonite in a clear cylinder in Lena’s hands. She would know that sickly green glow anywhere. “Are you crazy?” she demanded. “Are you trying to kill him?”

  Brainy gently pulled her away from the bed. “In the words of a respected American law enforcement officer,” he intoned, “‘Trust me; I know what I’m doing.’”

  She was Supergirl. A Kryptonian on Earth, where the lower gravity made her superstrong and able to fly. Brainiac 5 couldn’t move her unless she allowed herself to be moved. Now, in this instance, she permitted him to shuffle her off to one side—she’d realized that even though the kryptonite wasn’t shielded by lead, she felt no ill effects.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  “A kryptonite derivative,” Lena told her. “It will help him.”

  Supergirl’s eyes widened.

  “It’s not a miracle cure,” Lena cautioned her, reading the glee on the Girl of Steel’s face. “His body still has to do the work. But this substance—”

  “Kryptonite-X!”

  “—will make his body more able to repair itself,” Lena went on, with only a mildly scornful glance in Brainy’s direction.

  “So it accelerates his healing?” Supergirl asked, eyeing the cylinder warily.

  “Yes.” Lena hesitated. “This was the only sample Lex had available. Once it’s used, there’s no guarantee we can make more. If you think we should hold off, save it for another time—”

  “Not a chance! Do it—save him. Now.”

  A minute passed after Superman’s exposure to the new mineral. Then another. Faster than Supergirl thought possible, the minutes stacked up into an hour.

  J’Onn joined them halfway through, phasing through the ceiling and transforming from J’Onn J’Onzz to Hank Henshaw in the blink of an eye. His Martian shape-shifting abilities allowed him to take on almost any form; he’d masqueraded as Hank Henshaw for so long that it felt like his natural form, and he defaulted to it almost unconsciously now. He’d locked down the scene at the park with the DEO, then taken to the skies to try to find out what had hurt Superman.

  “But it’s a big sky, and it could have happened anywhere,” he told them. “I’m sorry, Kara.”

  “It’s OK.” She impulsively hugged him. “Thanks for trying.”

  “Did you look at latitude 39.2341752, longitude–98.397283, altitude roughly 13,000 feet?” Brainy asked.

  Everyone in the room went silent for a moment. “Why do you say that?” Kara asked.

  Brainy rarely shrugged, but he had a particular way of tilting his head while also arching an eyebrow that had the same sort of disaffected impact. “Once I knew that Superman was in fact the falling object, I was able to use his mass in my calculations, conjoined with the arc tangent of his path through the sky, relative atmospheric density, and other factors to determine the origin point of his troubles.”

  “Wait a second,” Alex interrupted. “You took measurements of all those things at the time?”

  “Of course not,” Brainy said, offended. “I simply remembered them.”

  “You . . . memorized the entire scene at actual size . . .” Kara prompted.

  “Yes, of course,” said Brainy. “And then replayed my memory, this time taking necessary measurements.”

  Supergirl, Alex, Lena, and J’Onn all shared a moment of wow. If Brainiac 5 noticed, he didn’t let on.

  “So . . . you’re saying you know where Superman was when he was sent spiraling out of control and down to Earth?” Kara asked.

  “When did you figure this out?” Lena wanted to know.

  “While we were modifying Lex Luthor’s kryptonite, of course. When else?”

  Lena coughed with surprise. “You were able to do those calculations in your head at the same time that we were bio-chemically altering some of the most delicate and complicated minerals in the world?”

  Brainy made a small hmpf noise, almost inaudible. “I possess a twelfth-level effector intelligence. I can process a dozen independent threads simultaneously with no loss in efficiency. Modifying Lex Luthor’s tools required only three such threads.” He paused. “I had a lot of spare time.”

  J’Onn sighed. “Very well, then. I’ll go check out—”

  “Don’t,” Kara said, grabbed his wrist to keep him from flying off. “Whatever it was, it was strong enough to hurt Kal-El. Let me scope it out first.”

  She tilted her head skyward and looked through the ceiling with her X-ray vision. Then, with her telescopic vision, she zeroed in on the patch of sky Brainy had identified with his coordinates. What she saw made her gasp.

  The sky at 13,000 feet over Smallville, Kansas, was torn. There was no other way to describe it. A jagged gash had shredded open the very air, bleeding a sickly red light into the pale blue sky. Clouds that scudded too close to the rip seemed to blow apart, their edges gone black before they dissipated entirely.

  It looked like a nightmare version of the breaches her friends Barry Allen and Cisco Ramon used to traverse the Multiverse and jaunt from Earth to Earth. Where the Flash and Vibe’s breaches were smooth-edged and gently wobbled with energies, this one was jagged, its border agitated and sharp, limned with a too-deep crimson.

  She narrowed her eyes, focusing more, trying to penetrate into the breach itself. But something in its composition blocked her super-vision, just like the energies coruscating around her cousin’s body had prevented her from seeing it was him swaddled in all that smoke and ash.